BETWEEN (SPACE TIME IMAGE LOSS)
2015 · Three-channel HD video with sound · 15-minute loop
Between (space time image loss) moves through dark chapters of psychiatric history, conspiracy, confusion and moments of astonishment. Across three video channels, the work questions what can be understood as real and how memory shapes our understanding of the world.
Between (space time image loss) grew out of research into the psychiatric experiments conducted by Donald Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Connected through covert funding to the CIA’s MKULTRA programme, this research included attempts to disrupt established patterns of behaviour and influence patients through the intensive repetition of recorded messages.
This history becomes a starting point for an inquiry into memory, perception and the continuity of a life. The work considers how our understanding of reality depends on relationships between what we experience, what we remember and what we are told. When those relationships become uncertain, the distinction between an event and its recollection can become difficult to sustain.
Moving through psychiatric history, conspiracy, confusion and astonishment, Between returns to the question of what can be named as real. Memory becomes central to this inquiry: a means through which the world acquires coherence, and a vulnerable ground upon which that coherence rests.